This is the blog of David M. Raab, marketing technology consultant and analyst. Mr. Raab is Principal at Raab Associates Inc. The blog is named for the Customer Experience Matrix, a tool to visualize marketing and operational interactions between a company and its customers.

Tuesday, August 04, 2009

The folks at Marketo have always recognized that they can only succeed if more marketers learn the basics of demand generation. As a result, they’ve invested heavily in educational materials that are not directly related to their particular product.

Their latest contribution is The Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing, a 38-page workbook that may not quite live up to its ambitious title but certainly gives a good overview of the subject. In particular, it provides details on how to build several types of lead nurturing campaigns (incoming lead processing, stay in touch, accelerator and lead lifecycle) and provides worksheets for matching content to buyer needs and for calculating ROI.

The workbook also includes a half dozen “How Marketo Does It” sidebars that reveal more than you might expect about Marketo’s own programs. I was surprised to see them share so many details, but suspect Marketo would say their competitors all subscribe to those programs anyway, so they have no secrets to begin with. Whatever the reason, it’s a refreshing and laudably mature approach.

In the interest of fairness, I should also point out that other vendors undertake their own market education programs. Nearly every one of them has a “resources” section on their Web site with a collection of useful papers; they also have blogs with helpful advice. Of these, I’d say Eloqua’sDigital Body Language stands out as an especially good source of information. Indeed, it so happens that today’s post on Auditing Your Content Assets covers some of the same ground as the Marketo paper, including a quite similar worksheet for matching content to buyers.

For that matter, Raab Associates itself has what we consider very useful materials on the Raab Guide Web site. We recently made that all available without user registration, although I'm reconsidering that decision – it doesn’t seem to have increased traffic significantly, and we capture many fewer visitor names. Looking at how Marketo does it, they provide some materials without registration but require your name in exchange for premium content. That sounds like a reasonable approach.

1 comment:

David,Thanks for highlighting the ongoing education in the marketing automation/demand generation space. As the space flourishes, there's starting to be a much larger need for education in terms of what's important when considering an investment. As with any area of business, there are people, process, and technology considerations involved in being successful.

The more that buyers are aware of the tough questions they need to ask, both of vendors and internally, in order to maximize their opportunity for success, the better we all do in the industry.